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Topic: Drawing (Read 5073 times) |
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Isaac Grosof
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I think that if all of both sides' rabbits are taken, it should only be a draw if both sides have the the same strongest piece.
what do you think?
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Sorry about that one thing.
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The_Jeh
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #1 on: Mar 24th, 2008, 6:53pm » |
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It will almost always be the case that both players will have their elephants left. What if one player has only an elephant, while the other has all his other pieces? Then it's likely that neither would make any progress towards an immobilization through total capture. I used to be skeptical of the rabbit extermination victory, but now I am all for it.
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| « Last Edit: Mar 24th, 2008, 6:55pm by The_Jeh » |
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Janzert
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Arimaa player #247
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #2 on: Mar 24th, 2008, 8:03pm » |
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Just from the stand point of having a single unified set of rules for both tournament and casual play, I would like to see the rabbit extermination rule applied to all games.
Janzert
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Fritzlein
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Arimaa player #706
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #3 on: Mar 24th, 2008, 8:52pm » |
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I also see value in a unified set of rules. It's the final step in a long transition from the play-testing and experimentation stage to wide-spread play in different venues.
When a game is first being designed, everything is fair game, and you can change rules at the drop of hat. As the design takes shape, you can still make changes, but you start to have good features you don't want to mess up. After a while you don't want to fix anything that isn't broken. But nothing is broken any more, and the game has been much engaged as it is. We are finally getting past all of those stages and on to a new one, where lots of people have become familiar with the rules and adapted to them, so making a change can be an inconvenience to a lot of people.
Very concretely, we've seen what having two sets of rules did to Clueless2006. That poor bot tries to play in the game room with tournament rules, but thinks it has won when it captures all opposing rabbits, and therefore loses its will to play on. Another example that will occur in the future (I hope) is that there will be more than one place to play Arimaa on-line, so non-uniform rules could break compatibility between the two venues.
If Omar decides that he wants to keep draws around (which I don't really care for), then I support having the draw in every game everywhere, including tournaments. The chess world manages to hold tournaments even with lots of draws; we could surely manage with one per ten thousand games. At least that way the rules would be the rules. I think Arimaa is destined for the big time no matter how rabbit elimination is treated, but it would be a slight drag on the spread and acceptance of Arimaa to have multiple rules, and a slight boost to have a single, universal set of rules that doesn't change, and doesn't need to change.
Finalizing the rules is just a part of Arimaa growing up.
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| « Last Edit: Mar 24th, 2008, 8:53pm by Fritzlein » |
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omar
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #4 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 1:31am » |
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I've always felt that a "well designed" game should give an equal chance to both players such that a perfectly played game results in a draw. I've also felt that the margin of draw should be very slim so that very few games would ever result in a draw. Not that I would ever play anything close to a perfect game, but for the design of a game I've thought that these are good ideals to have 
Then theory meets reality. In knock out style tournaments it can be very inconvenient to have draws. It can requires having extra games and that can really mess up the schedule. So in the Arimaa match rules I had to introduce the extermination rule so that draws can be avoided.
Recently, Karl pointed out to me that just because a game allows for drawn positions, it doesn't necessarily mean that perfect play will result in a draw. Very interesting. So it is possible then to have a game where non-perfect play can result in draws, but perfect play leads to a win for say the first player. An example is connect four. This means that the game designer isn't off the hook just by allowing drawn positions; the game still has to be solved to say if it is ultimately a draw or not. Bummer. But of course not allowing any drawn positions definitely means the game will never be a draw.
My current position has been to allow for both drawn games and non-drawn games by announcing before the game if the extermination rule is active or not. Why not let the tournament director or event organizer decide if they want to allow draws or not. That gets the game designer off the hook
But over time I've been finding that in all the tournaments I host that I am opting to not allow draws. Even in the 2008 Open Classic which used a Swiss format I opted to not allow draws. A game which does not allow draws does make things a lot easier. You would not believe how much code I've written to handle draws; most of which has hardly ever been used.
Also over time my view of a "well designed" game has been changing to that of a "practically well designed" game. I'm starting to appreciate the view that it doesn't matter so much if the game is ideally a draw, but rather what matters more is that for non-perfect play the game should be balanced for both player. In other words for non-perfect play one side should not have a significant advantage over the other. Thus, a "practically well designed" game does not allow for draws and is well balanced at high level, non-perfect play. I think I would be very content with Arimaa not allowing for draws if we find that even at very high levels of play both sides have a fairly equal chance of winning.
This slow and eventual change of view reminds me of when I was so reluctant to introduce an exception rule of not allowing rabbits to move backwards. I was hung up on that for a while until I finally realized that it was needed to prevent the game from ever going back to a previous state.
So effective July 1st 2008, we will officially switch to using the extermination rule in all games.
We won't know for a long time yet if Arimaa is well balance for both players at high levels of play. We are starting to collect such games with all the postals and tournaments we have going now, but we will need a lot bigger sample to say for sure. In the future if we find conclusively that Arimaa is favored towards one side or the other by more than 2%, I want to reserve the right to try a significant rule change to the setup which I think may help to make it more balanced.
1w Gold places only two pieces: E and R
1b Silver places only four pieces: e, r, m, and r
2w Gold places: M, R, H, R
2b Silver places: h, r, h, r
3w Gold places: H, R, D, R
3b Silver places: d, r, d, r
4w Gold places: D, R, C, R
4b Silver places: c, r, c, r
5w Gold places: C, R and takes two steps
5b Silver takes four steps
6w Gold takes four steps
6b Silver takes four steps
All placement is within the players first two rows.
This slows down the setup stage a bit, but not too much. If it makes the game more equal, then I think it is worth it. Of course there is no guarantee that this will make things more balanced, but we won't know until we try. It will be a real pain at that time to make such a significant change, so lets just hope that Arimaa is well balanced as it is
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| « Last Edit: Mar 25th, 2008, 1:41am by omar » |
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arimaa_master
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #5 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 7:08am » |
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on Mar 25th, 2008, 1:31am, omar wrote:
So effective July 1st 2008, we will officially switch to using the extermination rule in all games.
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Great! Thanks Omar.
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arimaa_master
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Arimaa player #2010
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #6 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 7:11am » |
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on Mar 25th, 2008, 1:31am, omar wrote:
We won't know for a long time yet if Arimaa is well balance for both players at high levels of play. We are starting to collect such games with all the postals and tournaments we have going now, but we will need a lot bigger sample to say for sure. In the future if we find conclusively that Arimaa is favored towards one side or the other by more than 2%, I want to reserve the right to try a significant rule change to the setup which I think may help to make it more balanced.
1w Gold places only two pieces: E and R
1b Silver places only four pieces: e, r, m, and r
2w Gold places: M, R, H, R
2b Silver places: h, r, h, r
3w Gold places: H, R, D, R
3b Silver places: d, r, d, r
4w Gold places: D, R, C, R
4b Silver places: c, r, c, r
5w Gold places: C, R and takes two steps
5b Silver takes four steps
6w Gold takes four steps
6b Silver takes four steps
All placement is within the players first two rows.
This slows down the setup stage a bit, but not too much. If it makes the game more equal, then I think it is worth it. Of course there is no guarantee that this will make things more balanced, but we won't know until we try. It will be a real pain at that time to make such a significant change, so lets just hope that Arimaa is well balanced as it is
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My point of view is that arimaa is already perfectly balanced therefore I am against any setup changes. 
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mistre
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #7 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 8:36am » |
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Here are my views on the subjects:
Rabbit extermination rules - all for it. Since I started playing Arimaa, I wondered why this wasn't already in place as an easy fix for draws. In my mind, it is just another way to win like immobilization. This will make for some interesting bot bashing and could re-spark interest in a challenge of some sort.
Starting setups - I believe that any gold-silver advantage is so small that it is irrelevant. Gold gets to go first, but Silver gets to set-up its pieces 2nd. This provides an asymmetrical balance that would be very difficult to calculate, but in practice it works! If it isn't broke, don't fix it. Any other set-up rules would just add too much complexity with no way to measure success.
However, I would like to see the dogs and horses switched in the default set-up. Almost everyone starts their horses on B2 and G2 and therefore this would cut down on the number of pieces you have to shift in the set-up phase.
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chessandgo
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Arimaa player #1889
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #8 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 11:12am » |
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Very interesting, Omar. These new rules would lengthen a bit the placement process, and complicate the rules description, but they might very well make the game almost completely balanced.
I think gold has an advantage, and if we're fortunate enough for the community knowledge to explode in the coming decades, I'm sure this advantage will become relevant, so your new rules might be a great thing not to fall into the black/white paradigm that somehow lessens the interest of chess.
All in all, I like very much to know that you already have a handy solution for solving a problem that might occur in the far future ! Great
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aaaa
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Arimaa player #958
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #9 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 11:44am » |
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Omar, now that you are tinkering with the rules anyway could you also make third repetition illegal instead of an instant loss? This will have to entail updating the immobilization detection code though.
If Gold were to have an undue advantage, then the most intuitive fix would just be to restrict his first move after the setup to just two steps; that way, as long as both players use up all their steps per move, it would mean they would switch being "up" two steps after each move.
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jdb
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #10 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 12:12pm » |
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on Mar 25th, 2008, 11:44am, aaaa wrote:Omar, now that you are tinkering with the rules anyway could you also make third repetition illegal instead of an instant loss? This will have to entail updating the immobilization detection code though.
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I agree.
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aaaa
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Arimaa player #958
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #11 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 1:35pm » |
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If this is to be the rule thread to end all rule threads, let's be thorough about it.
I agree that the scoring system should be abolished, to be replaced by a time control system, either total time used or by some sort of accelerated system. I have a slight preference for the latter because in the case of total time used, whenever someone ends up having used up more than half of the total game time, there would be a sudden, ungraceful shift in advantage between the two players.
On a more silly note: I also don't like the fact that it seems that officially at least it's not the the knight piece that is substituted for the horse.
Scour the following links for your pet peeves and let's use this opportunity to finally get rid of them:
Arimaa Game Rules
Arimaa Match Rules
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omar
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Arimaa player #2
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #12 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 4:21pm » |
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on Mar 25th, 2008, 7:11am, arimaa_master wrote:
My point of view is that arimaa is already perfectly balanced therefore I am against any setup changes. |
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I hope your hunch is right. My gut feel also says that it is, because it takes a little while for serious interaction (rabbit pulls or captures) to develop, thus allowing room for the initiative to flip/flop between the two sides. So if you look at it that way the alternating setup I proposed just allows more moves to pass before serious interaction develops.
I am definitely not proposing to change the setup rules anytime soon. But say 10 years from we are convinced that the Gold player has a 5% advantage, then we might begin to try this setup rule on an experimental bases and if it helps we might then consider adopting it. I'm just throwing this out right now so that we know there is a potential safety net if the game is not balanced for the two sides.
BTW, in my previous post I forgot to give credit to Karl for introducing me (offline, probably about a year ago) to the view that it doesn't matter if the game does not allow draws as long as it is well balanced for both sides. This was crucial in changing my view of a well designed game. But once you accept this you really have to scrutinize the setup stage of a game since all imbalance can be traced back to it. This got me thinking about how the setup could be made more balanced (at least have the appearance of being more balance) and lead to the setup rules described in my previous post.
If I were launching Arimaa today, I would include the extermination rule and the alternating setup (as opposed to the sequential setup). But its too late now for the alternating setup. Unless the current setup proves to have a noticeable imbalance there really is no need to mess with it.
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omar
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #13 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 4:33pm » |
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on Mar 25th, 2008, 11:44am, aaaa wrote:Omar, now that you are tinkering with the rules anyway could you also make third repetition illegal instead of an instant loss? This will have to entail updating the immobilization detection code though.
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Yes, online it essentially is like this. The new interface warns about the repetition and does not allow you to send it. A properly programmed bot would also not lose by repetition. For off line games it can in rare cases be hard to detect the repetition. But even then it would be possible to have a computer referee the moves and warn of the repetition.
I will include this change too in the July 1st 2008 update.
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omar
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Re: Drawing
« Reply #14 on: Mar 25th, 2008, 7:17pm » |
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on Mar 25th, 2008, 11:44am, aaaa wrote:
If Gold were to have an undue advantage, then the most intuitive fix would just be to restrict his first move after the setup to just two steps; that way, as long as both players use up all their steps per move, it would mean they would switch being "up" two steps after each move. |
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Actually Wayne Schmittberger had also suggested this to me shortly after seeing Arimaa back in 2003. I like this option as well since it would be much easier to adopt. In fact if it turns out that Gold has the advantage, I would prefer to try this option first.
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